In late October 1980, days before Ronald Reagan was elected president, Congress summoned 20 experts in various fields to a beachfront hotel in Florida. Their mandate was simple: figure out how to address the dire threat posed to the climate by fossil fuel emissions, then deliver their recommendations to Congress in the form of a statement. Yes, a statement. Because nothing says legislative urgency like a well-worded memo.

Every word said during four marathon sessions over the next 36 hours - every disagreement or digression, tirade or truce - was recorded by a stenographer for posterity into a single document, hundreds of pages long, that stands as an artifact from a time when expertise was trusted, before corporate greed and political expediency mired "debate" about rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere in a haze of misinformation and inaction. The fact that this meeting took place at all - that experts in climate, energy, law, philosophy, politics and more agreed on the fundamental facts, yet struggled to reach consensus on what to do about them - is fascinating, if perhaps not the most natural fit for a movie. This was, after all, a conference room of specialists sharing evidence via overhead projector.

Now, The Guardian reports, that very meeting is the subject of A Statement, an outstanding climate change dramedy premiering at the New York Film Festival. Paul Rudd, Paul Giamatti and Tatiana Maslany lead an excellent ensemble in this dramatization of a failed conference on climate change - a phrase that feels almost redundant at this point. The film captures the 1980 gathering where 20 experts, armed with overhead projectors and a mandate, tried to save the planet and mostly produced a document. Spoiler alert: the planet did not receive the memo in time.